White RoomNEW

Four Percent Busy

A box with 8 GB of RAM and 32 GB of swap runs four processes, each with a working set of about 3 GB. Monitoring shows:

metric before now
major page faults / s 20 200,000
CPU utilization 78% 4%
swap device utilization 3% 100%

Adding a fifth identical process makes every number worse. What is going on, and what actually helps?